Delicious (11 page)

Then his smile went away, and he looked at her with something that would have passed for genuine concern on the part of any other man. But on him, it only made her even more wary.

“Are you well, Miss Bessler?” he asked.

The quiet intimacy of his tone disconcerted her entirely. Though they’d been introduced two years ago, it had been shortly before she’d shut herself off from the outside world for the next seventeen months. Their acquaintance was of the most incidental variety and she saw no reason for him to care whether she was well.

Her father came into the drawing room. Mr. Marsden turned and greeted him. The men proclaimed their mutual pleasure at seeing each other again, while Lizzy silently breathed a thanksgiving that she was no longer alone with Mr. Marsden.

“Shall we get going, then, Papa?” she said brightly.

Stuart had forgotten how beautiful Fairleigh Park was, even so late in the year. The gardens had been planned with the progression of the seasons in mind; the estate abounded in foliage the colors of wine and gold, warm and vivid against a backdrop of mossy evergreens.

Twenty years it had been, since he left for India at seventeen, furious at both his father and Bertie. But it felt even longer. The scent of Fairleigh Park in deep autumn—of falling leaves and the stillness of the countryside between the end of harvest and the bustle of yule—was one he associated with his earliest years in Yorkshire, before he started public school and came back home only during Christmas, Easter, and the months of summer.

He walked the mile from the gates of the estate to the village. The sun shed an anemic light, but it was still a clear, crisp day. The village had been built upon an incline, its biscuit-colored houses hugging the sides of a tributary to the Ure. A stone bridge from the sixteenth century spanned the fast-flowing brook.

As he passed through the village, curtains fluttered; curious faces appeared from around corners and behind drystone walls. The villagers had guessed his identity. He wondered what they thought of his seemingly triumphant return, at this once-illegitimate up-start having at last entirely supplanted Bertie.

Atop the bridge two young boys threw rocks and twigs into the stream below. Engrossed in their game, they paid no attention to him. He stopped and watched them.

See that leaf in the water, Stuart? If it’s lucky, it will go all the way to the sea.

Will it really?

If it’s lucky. My mum lived on a house by the sea, in the south. She died there. It was a pretty place. I want to go there again.

Even though your mum died there?

I wasn’t there when she died. It will remind me of when she was alive. She used to sit on a chair and watch me when I sea-bathed.

He shook his head. That conversation had to be almost thirty years old. Amazing what random tidbits the mind uncovered at times, washing up on the shores of consciousness like jetsam after a storm.

He followed the market road out of the village and kept to it for another mile before setting out across the still green pastures to climb up the limestone ridge that defined the perimeter of the dale. From this vantage point it was easy to see that Fairleigh Park was a modestly scaled country house, more Petit Trianon than Château de Versailles. But once upon a time it had been grand to him, grand and spectacular, the closest thing he’d ever seen to a fairy tale castle.

I don’t know where you live.

Somewhere in the shadow of the prince’s castle.

He let the rocky paths take him the long way around to the woods behind the manor, in the direction of the gamekeeper’s cottage. Bertie had left Fairleigh Park in sound shape: the estate supported itself and the urban properties were as lucrative as Stuart had supposed. Out of a four-foot stack of papers, only two items of expenditure had struck him as anomalies. One, Madame Durant’s wages were notably less than what he’d expected. Two, Bertie paid for the public school fees of one Michael Robbins, the adopted son of Fairleigh Park’s longtime gamekeeper.

Bertie had been generous in his charitable giving, but in every other instance his money had gone to churches, institutions, and committees—intermediaries, not individuals, except in the case of Michael Robbins. And Bertie didn’t send the boy to some third-rate school, but to Rugby, one of the oldest and most prestigious public schools in the country and—ironically enough—Stuart’s alma mater.

He wasn’t certain how he felt about possibly having a nearly grown nephew. Old, perhaps. But if Michael Robbins were indeed Bertie’s natural child, then Stuart would do right by the boy, as his own late father had done right by him—as well as he had known how.

The gamekeeper’s cottage was squat and ordinary, its walls constructed from the same weathered white rock used in the miles of drystone walls that delineated fields and pastures in the dale. James Robbins, the gamekeeper, was in his early sixties, short, bald, and stout. He smiled widely as he realized who had come to call, his eyes nearly disappearing into the leathery folds of his face. Mrs. Robbins, as old as her husband, plain, and stooped, was visibly flustered as she welcomed Stuart into her unassuming home.

Stuart remembered her as the spinster daughter of the local curate, accompanying her father from time to time on his visits to Fairleigh Park. She’d married down considerably. The gamekeeper’s cottage was shabby compared even to the curate’s house, which had been no palace.

To Stuart’s surprise, Michael Robbins was also at home—he’d been given a special dispensation to attend his sponsor’s funeral. His parents presented him to Stuart with much pomp and pride: a young man of sixteen, tall, dark, and handsome, with undeniable intelligence in his eyes and a remarkable presence for an adolescent.

Stuart stayed a quarter hour. He drank tea, ate Mrs. Robbins’s lumpy seed cake, and engaged in small talk about the weather and the goings-on in the village. From time to time he addressed a question directly to Michael Robbins. The boy had acquired from his time at Rugby a startlingly pure upper-class accent. When he spoke, his parents listened in rapture, as if sonatas cascaded from his lips.

But it was more than his accent. It was his posture, his well-made clothes, his way of handling a teaspoon—it had taken Stuart many raps to the knuckles from Fräulein Eisenmueller to achieve a similarly elegant grip. The boy looked entirely incongruous in the low-ceilinged, cramped parlor, a row of shotguns on the smoke-darkened wall behind him, a rusted snare under his chair.

As Stuart rose to take his leave, he sought a reasonable-sounding excuse to speak to the boy alone. But he needed not have taxed his brain. Michael Robbins shrugged into his own overcoat.

“I’ll accompany Mr. Somerset back to the house,” he said to his parents.

They left the gamekeeper’s cottage together and spoke companionably about their Rugby experiences. They both belonged to School House and both played the eponymous sport—Michael did Stuart one better; he was the captain of the Running Eight.

Then a small silence took over. Stuart debated whether it was advisable to ask the boy outright about his true parentage and his possible connection to Bertie.

“Sir, please forgive me,” said Michael. “But you wouldn’t happen to be related to me in any way, would you?”

Stuart had been struggling with an artful turn of phrase that would allow him to pose his question without shocking the boy. The boy, apparently, was beyond his powers to shock.

“You mean, as via my late brother?”

“No, sir. I mean, as in direct descent.”

The question stopped Stuart in his tracks. Had Michael been six or seven years younger, he’d have wondered. But the boy was too old to be the result of his night with Cinderella.

“I do not believe so,” he said.

Michael did not seem overly disappointed. He shrugged. “The odds were against it. But I thought I’d ask anyway.”

“Does this mean that you are not related to my brother either?”

“I asked Mr. Bertram once, shortly after he told my parents he would pay my school fees,” said Michael calmly. “He said no, that he’d made certain he did not sire any children out of wedlock.”

Stuart was both relieved and strangely disappointed. But above all, he was astonished. Bertie had been paying for Michael’s school fees since the latter was eleven. He himself at eleven would never have had the audacity to ask such a question.

“I hope you don’t think that I’m not grateful to my adoptive parents, sir,” said Robbins. “I love them dearly. But a man can’t know who he is until he knows where he came from. And I’ve only half of the picture.”

Half of the picture. Stuart resumed walking. “You know the identity of your natural mother?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“Then why not ask her?”

“She denies it. But I know it’s her.” Michael kicked a pebble out of his way. “I hope I do not sound too deranged when I say this, but I remember my life as an infant—fragments of it, at least. I remember her face. The moment she came to Fairleigh Park, I knew she had come back for me.”

And Stuart knew too. “Madame Durant.”

Robbins’s school fees were part of her recompense. Perhaps she feared that the Robbinses wouldn’t accept such charity from her, so she routed it through Bertie instead, taking a cut in her in-hand wages.

Robbins did not deny it. “She always said you were a good example for me.”

Madame Durant thought Stuart was a good example for her child—Madame Durant who wouldn’t make him a sandwich?

“You are going to the house to call on her?” It was three o’clock in the afternoon, she wouldn’t be needed in the kitchen yet.

“She would expect a visit from me, since I’m home,” said Michael.

There was more obligation than anticipation in the boy’s voice. Madame Durant’s relationship with her child was not without complications.

“May I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Your adoption is not a secret in these parts. You are a promising young man and Madame Durant seems to have made an effort to stay close to you. Why do you suppose she denies that she is your mother?”

“I wish I knew. I ask myself the same question. All I can think is that she means to marry well someday, and it would not do to have a known bastard child about, adopted or not.”

Stuart raised a brow at the boy’s brutal cynicism.

“The world is an ugly place,” said Michael, almost placidly. “People like me realize it sooner.”

People like
them.
Illegitimacy tainted in different ways. For Stuart, it had been a deep-seated, constant fear that one wrong step, and it would all be taken from him. For Michael Robbins, it was a rage beneath the apparent blitheness.

“Tell me, young man,” said Stuart, “what do you see as your place in this ugly world?”

As much as Lizzy detested Mr. Marsden, she couldn’t quite keep her eyes off him.

While regiments of grim-faced angels mass-manufactured most of humanity in some industrial division of Heaven—how could it be otherwise, given the relentless rise in population in England and everywhere else—Mr. Marsden could justifiably claim to have been created as a one-of-a-kind specimen, a pleasant afternoon’s diversion for the Good Lord Himself.

He was, if anything, even more gorgeous upon closer inspection. In the tilt of his head and the carriage of his spine was beauty by the bushel and grace in ridiculously abundant spades.